Wednesday, March 24, 2010

For some odd reason this morning, I was thinking about a few of the bazillion books I’ve devoured and thoughts of my childhood popped into my head. I don’t often think about those years. Very few of the memories are pleasant.

Home consisted of cruelties I couldn’t escape and at school, I was the bespectacled clutz that all the guys sought out for advice on how to get the pretty girls to like them. Then I was introduced to the world of Barbara Cartland.

A very perceptive neighbor rescued me and took me under her wing. An older lady and avid romance reader, she belonged to a book-of-the-month club. And she had been a loyal member for a while. Stacks upon stacks, she had filled an entire room with paperbacks. God rest her generous soul.

Under the pretense of helping her feed her numerous cats or clean her house, she squirreled me away into a corner of that wondrous room and I’d escape from my miseries for hours. Thanks to an elderly lady’s kindness and the wondrous worlds of Barbara Cartland, a young girl found sanctuary when she needed it the most. Never underestimate the power of a book when it comes to a hungry soul.

Has anyone influenced you or saved you from misery with the written word?

Friday, March 12, 2010

While I sat at the day job and scrolled through a sea of URGENT emails, answered the phone and turned the two way radio down so I could hear what the person in the next cube shouted over the wall; my blackberry proceeded to vibrate its way across my desk. When I caught the little beast, I rubbed the wheel with my thumb. Wow. Now, I had two hundred and thirty-seven emails to read.

And then it hit me. A great blog topic. Communication. How some of the methods have advanced in as short a time as the past thirty years.

My youngest daughter is twenty-nine years old. What does that have to do with communication? My husband and I were stationed in Guam and that’s where she was born. No one in our family met our little bundle of joy until we returned to the United States eighteen months later. Other then photographs sent back home by overseas mail, they didn’t get to meet her until she was eighteen months old.

No internet. No email. No web cam. No video. We’ve advanced quite a bit wouldn’t you say?

Of course, when you’re buried up to your eyeballs in emails, tweets, texts, and IM’s, you might consider it a double-edged sword.

And even in this day and age of instant communication all over the world, sometimes we still don’t talk to the person right next to us. So, maybe we still have some advancement yet to go. What do you think?